Coming soon: Postage stamp-sized 1TB SSDs

SSDs haven’t found their way into the mass market yet, but a team of Japanese researchers is already trying to make them more worthwhile. The team claims it has developed a technology that helps to shrink the size of SSDs by no less than 90%, makes them cheaper and boosts energy efficiency by 70%.
The research group is comprised of people from a handful of different institutions, i. e. Toshiba or Keio University in Tokyo (where Professor Tadahiro Kuroda is the main person responsible).
The new technology makes it possible to produce 1TB SSDs that are as small as a postage stamp. The current prototype (pictured) is sized just like that and made of 128 NAND flash memory chips and one controller chip. It boasts a data transfer speed of 2Gbps and is based on radio communication, which (according to the researchers) leads to lower production costs.
A practical version is expected to be ready by 2012.
[CrunchGear via The Nikkei]

Intel and Micron's 25nm NAND Flash: The Secret to Cheap SSDs [SSD]

Intel and Micron's IMFT joint venture's just announced they've started producing NAND flash using 25nm transistors—they're pushing 8GB on a single die—with products shipping sometime this year in fatter capacities (up to 600GB). In English:
Using the smaller 25nm manufacturing process, they can get roughly twice as much storage in the same amount of space as the current 34nm flash manufacturing tech. More storage in the same amount of space, as we learned before, doesn't just mean more storage, it means more storage for cheaper.
[Gizmodo via Anandtech]

Micron RealSSD Drives Claim Title of World's Fastest (by a Lot) [Ssds]

Micron's new C300 2.5-inch SSDs are incredibly fast. We're talking 50% faster than the current market leaders, and fast enough to downright shame any hard drive. Yeah, there's a new SSD speed champ every week, but these are damned impressive.
The C300 SSDs, available in 128GB and 256GB capacities when they're released sometime early next year, whups the current top dogs in read/write speeds. It's also the first to take advantage of the new SATA 3.0, which allows 6Gb/s throughput, twice that of SATA 2.0—but regardless of whether it's using 2.0 or 3.0, it's still blazingly fast. It's rated at 355MB/s read and 215MB/s write—for comparison, the champ, OCZ's Agility EX, gets 255MB/s and 195MB/s read and write speeds, respectively. You can see it compared with "a market leader" (probably either the OCZ or maybe Intel's X25-M) here:

By using the new ONFI 2.1 specification, it's also got nearly five times the data speed per transfer, which is basically means you'll be seeing improved performance while multitasking.
The C300 series is expensive, obviously, at about $350 for the 128GB and $715 for the 256GB (and then only when bought in bulk), but it's a pretty incredible performer—hopefully we'll be seeing it in some equally impressive laptops when it's released next year.
[Gizmodo via Micron]

Fusion-io IoXtreme SSD: Fastest Consumer SSD on the Market [SSDs]

HotHardware took a look at this consumer-focused PCI-Express SSD from Fusion-io, and found that while it's pretty damn expensive at $900 for 80GB, it's blazingly fast, hitting 700MB/s read and 300MB/s write speeds.
Unfortunately, in addition to the expense, it can't be used as a bootable drive quite yet, although Fusion-io claims that feature is coming. And we probably shouldn't gloss over the expense—yeah, it's a "consumer drive," and it's cheap compared to similar drives, but it's still $900 for 80GB. But it's a cool look at where storage could be headed, and if you've got enough money to snag one (available at Amazon), well, I hate you lots.
[Gizmodo via HotHardware via Engadget]

Samsung's New Ultra Slim 30-Nanometer Flash Memory Chips Will Cause Gadget Shrinkage [Flash Memory]

With stacks of eight being only 0.6mm thick, Samsung's new 30-nanometer NAND chips are practically anorexic, but for once that's a good thing. Thinner chips like these could bring smaller gadgets and hopefully also lead to lower SSD prices.
According to Samsung, their new chips are actually the slimmest ever and '40% thinner and lighter than a conventional memory package.' Whether those details are true or not, I look forward to seeing them hit the market and start slipping into newer, smaller gadgets.
[Gizmodo via Information Week via Engadget]

SanDisk Starts Shipping X4 Flash Cards, Will Eventually Be Awesome [Flash]

SanDisk's X4 tech packs four bits of data into each memory cell, compared with the typical one or two bits. That means they'll be able to far exceed the 32GB limit on SDHC, microSDHC and others, and they've started shipping.
Right now, they're only shipping in 8GB and 16GB capacities, which have been long available, but soon they'll be releasing 64GB and even higher flash memory. The X4 tech doesn't yet extend to SSDs, though it's not really clear why, but it's still great news for us gadget hounds. Many smartphones, especially those running Android, WinMo and BlackBerry OS, rely on microSDHC cards for memory, and a 64GB or even higher capacity card would make those much more viable as, say, multimedia machines. SanDisk assures us that the price will not skyrocket, which is a relief. X4 chips should start appearing in stores very soon. [Gizmodo via CNET]

Fancy cellphone runs Windows XP, now up for pre-order

Cellphones are evolving into pint-size PCs, and this xpPhone from Chinese company ITG is the latest extreme example. This Windows XP-running slider started out as a murky demo at a trade show, and now the company is offering it for preorder at an as-yet-undisclosed price.
Its 4.8-inch 800x480 touch screen is almost big enough to be a digital picture frame, and it has two drives — an 8GB solid-state drive and a 30GB spinning hard disk. The company tried to put everything into this AMD Super Mobile CPU-running phone, including Wi-Fi, connectivity to any US cell network, Bluetooth, VGA output and the ability to use it as an external hard disk.

Too bad it's heavy as an anvil, weighing 2 ounces shy of a pound. That's hefty enough to pull your pants down if you want to pocket the thing. Its stated battery life could be an exaggeration, boasting talk time of five hours. Wonder how long that 'Internet experience' will last with its lithium-ion battery.
Slim this down to about half its thickness and weight, and install Windows 7, and you could be looking at the phone/computer of the future.